Suckjoon Jun (FOM-institute AMOLF, Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Title:
Can entropy help bacteria to segregate their chromosomes?

Abstract:
Faithful segregation of duplicated chromosomes into separated compartments is essential to 
the viability of the cell. Surprisingly, we know more about the segregation mechanism in 
the cells of higher organisms than in bacteria. In the first part of talk, we will show 
that the conformational entropy of the duplicating circular DNA (thus of evolving topology) 
in a rod-shaped cell by itself could account not only for the spatial separation per se, 
but also for most major features of the dynamics of the daughter DNA strands observed in 
bacteria. This indicates that the minimum requirements to achieve robust bacterial 
chromosome segregation may be less stringent than previously considered, and has 
implications on the evolution of early life.